The electric Red Dragon – a new type of composter

Linked by Michael Levenston

Brian describes how the Red Dragon works.

The Red Dragon has surprised us!

Six months ago, we sceptics reluctantly agreed to test out a plug-in composter from Korea at the Vancouver Compost Demonstration Garden. We’d already had a bad experience with one electric bin and were quite sure that this one would act badly too.

We put in the required mix of sawdust and microbes supplied with the bin, added some water and plugged the attractive machine into the wall. Then periodically we put in food waste brought from home.

Open the lid and this is what you see.

Surprisingly, the waste had turned into compost the next time we looked inside. From food waste to black compost in a jiffy, 12-24 hours! There was evaporating moisture, a pleasant odour and the quietly turning metal prongs that every so often mixed the waste. No worms, no carbon/nitrogen ratio; we simply emptied the kitchen scraps bucket, closed the lid and were done.

We watched this process over the winter. Brian, David and John, three others on the ‘Red Dragon Team’, also tested the machine at their homes, adding more food than us and even dog poo. All of us have had ‘surprising’ success.

After six months, these small buckets contain 4/5 of the harvested compost from the Red Dragon. The composter comes with a black scooper to empty the bin and a scraper to clean the inside walls.

A soil test from the lab shows a compost that can be used safely in the garden.

It is neat, especially considering how fast the waste can be transformed. Is it worth it though, to buy another device that uses electricity and oil, when traditional composting doesnt require those resources?

Edible City is a fun, fast-paced journey through the local Good Food Movement that’s taking root in the San Francisco Bay Area, across the nation and around the world. Introducing a diverse cast of extraordinary and eccentric characters who are challenging the paradigm of our broken food system, Edible City digs into their unique perspectives and transformative work— from edible education to grassroots activism to building local economies— finding hopeful solutions to monumental problems. Inspirational, down-to-earth and a little bit quirky, Edible City captures the spirit of a movement that’s making real change and doing something truly revolutionary: growing the model for a healthy, sustainable local food system.